From IBM

Francesca Rossi is a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, and an professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy, currently on leave.
Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, specifically they include constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues in the development and behaviour of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision making.

She is a AAAI and a EurAI fellow, and a Radcliffe fellow 2015. She has been president of IJCAI and an executive councillor of AAAI. She is Associate Editor in Chief of JAIR and a member of the editorial board of Constraints, Artificial Intelligence, AMAI, and KAIS. She co-chairs the AAAI committee on AI and ethics and she is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute. She is in the executive committee of the IEEE global initiative on ethical considerations on the development of autonomous and intelligent systems and she belongs to the World Economic Forum Council on AI and robotics.

The future will see AI systems acting in the same environment as humans, in areas as diverse as driving, assistive technology, and health care. Think of self-driving cars, companion robots, and medical diagnosis support systems. AI has the capability to make sense of the huge volume of data surrounding us, transforming data into knowledge that we can use to make better decisions in all these areas of our personal and professional life. This could potentially lead to great transformations and to solving some of the most difficult problem in our society. However, in order to fully exploit the potential of AI, these systems need to follow the same ethical principles and moral value that we expect from other humans, so to build trust in them and create synergic partnership between humans and machines.

In this talk I will mention some of the ethical issues that the pervasive use of AI raises, as well as some initiatives, such as the Partnership on AI, whose goal is to educate, discuss, and possibly solve most of these issues.